By Jenny Davidson

Published: November 12, 2006

In recent years young adult fiction has proved a haven for novelists of ideas who also love storytelling. M. T. Anderson is one of the most interesting. His first novel was the unsettling suburban teenage vampire fantasy ''Thirsty'' (1997), but he didn't capture a wide audience until 2002, when his cult hit ''Feed'' appeared. A surprisingly affecting commodity-culture satire -- partly set on the moon, where rich teenagers go for spring break -- it earned Anderson a slew of fans and his first National Book Award nomination. His second nomination came last month for his new novel, ''The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing.''

The hallmarks of Anderson's style are a sharp ear for adolescent voices, a sometimes perverse sense of humor and an interest in the corrosive effects of groupthink on the average human's ability to behave ethically. His new book has all those qualities, but represents a striking advance in terms of both technique and literary ambition.

The novel is set in the 1760s, in Boston, where Octavian and his mother -- a West African princess named Cassiopeia -- live in the quarters of the Novanglian College of Lucidity, a near double for Swift's preposterous Academy of Lagado in ''Gulliver's Travels'' (1726). The college is a breeding ground for the kinds of pseudoscientific theory about differences between whites and blacks that make for queasy reading. Yet mother and son are treated well. Dressed in silks and expensive white wigs farmed from the heads of Prague pensioners, Octavian and his mother perform duets -- Octavian plays the violin, his mother the harpsichord -- and exchange syllogisms over dinner.

Uneasily aware that not every little boy has his excrement weighed daily and tallied against the food he ingests (nor do most black boys in colonial Boston enjoy lessons in Latin, Greek, music and mathematics), Octavian solves the puzzle of his treatment with the help of the college's slave Bono (short for ''Pro Bono'' -- his mother was pregnant when the college bought her, meaning it got two slaves for the price of one), who tells Octavian that he and his mother are not royalty but slaves.

Behind a Bluebeard-style forbidden door, Octavian discovers a chart of classifications of the races of men, an engraving of his naked mother (''Plate XVII. Pubescent female of the Oyo Country in Africa'') and volumes of data that reveal to him that he himself is the experiment. Octavian is being provided with a first-class education to help the collegians determine his capacity ''for the acquisition of the noble arts and sciences'' and divine whether he and his people are ''a separate and distinct species.''

Despite Octavian's genuine desire to prove his abilities, the results of this experiment have of course been predetermined by the prejudices of the experimenters (whose conclusions about the inferiority of the African echo beliefs held by real historical figures like David Hume and Thomas Jefferson, as Anderson points out in an afterword).

Formally, Anderson perfectly captures the narrative style of 18th-century books. The title page of ''Octavian Nothing'' presents Anderson (like novelists from Daniel Defoe to Samuel Richardson) as merely the editor of a compilation that relies on Octavian's testimony, printed ephemera and newspaper excerpts, scientific articles and private letters. The chaotic early days of the conflict that would come to be known as the American Revolution unfold as a backdrop to his personal history, and the intensity of the violence Anderson depicts may be too intense for some readers.

One of the most disturbing sections concerns the ''pox party'' of the subtitle, in which a select group of New England notables accept the college's invitation to undergo inoculation against the smallpox raging through the colonies -- a house party that will include games of whist and dancing, and ''a glass jar full of contaminate matter from the pox-sores of the dead.'' Such parties were popular at the time, despite the risk of disfigurement or death. In this case one of the inoculation's unintended victims is Octavian's mother, her decline and death described in absolutely gruesome detail.

fter his mother's death, language fails Octavian; Anderson gives instead his scratched-out passages of attempted description -- a nod to Sterne's ''Tristram Shandy'' and an eloquent way of expressing his pain. Indeed, Octavian's only flaw as a narrator may be the extent to which he has taken to heart the college's lessons of lucidity, making his voice less immediately engaging than Anderson's earlier teenage narrators.

As a child, Octavian says, he was taught the importance of observation: ''precise in notation, acute in investigation and rational in inference.'' These lessons could be grim -- for example, when the men of the college pet a dog and then drown it to see how long it takes to die, or feed alley cats and then drop them from a scaffold to determine ''the height from which cats no longer catch themselves, but shatter.'' Octavian's own battle between rage and reason is resolved on the side of reason, possibly at some cost to the reader's ability to identify with him.

But the story digs deep under one's skin despite that aggressive self-distancing. Anderson's imaginative and highly intelligent exploration of the horrors of human experimentation and the ambiguous history of America's origins will leave readers impatient for the promised sequel.

Photo: In Bushnell's Submarine (Scholastic, $16.99), Arthur S. Lefkowitz tells the true story of the American Turtle, a submarine that attacked a British warship (unsuccessfully, as it happened) in 1776. (Photo Courtesy of Jack Coggins/From ''Bushnell's Submarine'')